User Privacy and Data Flow Control for Android Apps

Mobile users often download apps on their devices to have different types of functionalities such as games, social media or other service Apps. Too often, these Apps consider data privacy less serious than users? expectations. Many mobile applications misbehaviors and uploads users? data without permission. Actually, some of the mobile user?s most personal data are carried and are free for other mobile applications to take at will, often without the device owner?s knowledge. For instance Android?s access control model uses a static list of permissions that Android App requests up front. The user is presented with the list at application installation time. The principle problem of controlling user private data starts after access is granted. There is currently no available approach designed around setting soft limits after the access is granted to control the user privacy and data flow that supports behavior configurability and User interaction. This project investigates Android permissions system that mobile users grant to installed Apps. The project is designed to provide Android based monitoring mechanism as a user interface that enables users to change an App behavior based on configurable privacy and data flow policy. One of the motivation for this research is the privacy and data flow policy in the hand of the end user. In order to achieve the project target objectives, the project methodology is divided into seven work packages including research background, analysis of data flow control and user interaction, Policies and algorithms development, implementation, testing, evaluation and project documentation.